For the second time in a month, Google’s email service Gmail has suffered from technical difficulties. The Google Apps Status page reported:
We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we’ve provided a workaround below.
…
You can access Gmail via IMAP
This error would affect users who utilize the web interface to access their Gmail. Users who have configured a desktop email client to access Gmail through IMAP were not affected.
Google later downplayed the problem from the above stated ‘unable to access Google Mail’ to merely ‘slowness with Google Contacts’. “A problem with Google Contacts caused many Gmail users to experience slowness and degraded service for about an hour today,” Google said in a statement.
The recent technical problems are unfortunate for Google as it tries to establish its commercial Google Apps service for business users. It may also affect the perception of Google for everyday users who store more and more of their personal data online based on the assumption that the data will be safe and accessible.
Google’s previous outage this month was caused by overloaded routers during routine maintenance.
